The Bing blog often looks back to the search engine’s predictions to give insight into how the process works. Today’s focus happened to be the 2016 U.S. Presidential Primaries. The country has undoubtedly been staring at the numbers for a number of reasons and Bing Predicts has been keen to keep accurate predictions on what the most likely outcome would be.
For Bing Predicts, the analyzation political figures with a history of social activity polls and involvement contribute directly to the result of the system’s expectations. The longer the candidates have been exposed to public and web content, the better calibrated the predictions can be. In the case of non-traditional candidates, presidential hopefuls that have not had political standing previously, the numbers are sporadic and unattainable except for previous primaries. This was true in the case of Republican candidates for the Iowa caucus on March 1st, causing Bing Predicts to blemish its previously perfect record.
Given the accumulated knowledge of the candidates as time goes on, building up a repertory of statistics and social analyzations, Bing Predicts encountered another flaw in the method of elections and predictions. For Missouri on March 15, both parties found themselves at a toss up of minimal margins. While the state found Clinton and Trump to ultimately defeat their opponents by 0.2%, Bing Predicts had expected the results to fall on the other side of the coin. With such a difficult-to-predict factors such as voter turnouts, that is where Bing Predicts falls short. After all, a machine cannot compensate for human behavior through statistics.
Besides those two instances, Bing Predicts continues to be on top of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election as it moves forward. As conventions moved closer, Bing Predicts developed a delegate tracker to determine the statistical likelihood of contested conventions. This prediction became certain with the dropping out of Cruz and Kasich from the running.
Bing Predicts continues to cover the elections as it moves forward through the year. Check it out on the Bing search engine.
